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Renowned art conservator Rosa Lowinger reveals in her beautiful memoir Dwell Time a journey of her difficult childhood in Miami growing up among people whose losses in the Cuban revolution, and earlier by the decimation of family in the Holocaust, clouded all family life. Through Lowinger’s relentless clear-eyed efforts to be the best practitioner possible, while squarely facing her fraught personal and work relationships, she comes to terms with her identity as Cuban and Jewish, American and Latinx.
Lowinger was in conversation with L.A. Times’s art and design columnist Carolina A. Miranda.
Rosa Lowinger is a Cuban-born American writer and art conservator. The award-winning author of Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt, 2005) and Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure American Seduction (Wolfsonian Museum, 2016), she is the founder and current Vice-President of RLA Conservation, LLC, one of the U.S.’s largest woman-owned art and architectural conservation firms. A Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, the Association for Preservation Technology, and the American Academy in Rome, Rosa regularly writes about conservation, historic preservation, the visual arts, and Cuba for popular and academic media.
Carolina A. Miranda is a Los Angeles Times columnist focused on art and design, who also makes regular forays into other areas of culture, including performance, books, and digital life. In her years at The Times, she has covered how communities are rethinking the nature of monuments, how architecture is shifting to accommodate a denser Los Angeles, the significance of political graphics in the post-Roe world and how narco-culture has permeated TV and the internet. She was a winner of the 2017 Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism and the 2021 Sigma Delta Chi Award presented by the Society of Professional Journalists.
